Non-occurrence of the Lavrentiev phenomenon for a class of convex nonautonomous Lagrangians

We consider the classical functional of the Calculus of Variations of the form $$\begin{array}{} \displaystyle I(u)=\int\limits_{{\it\Omega}}F(x, u(x), \nabla u(x))\,dx, \end{array}$$ where Ω is a bounded open subset of ℝn and F : Ω × ℝ × ℝn → ℝ is a Carathéodory convex function; the admissible functions u coincide with a prescribed Lipschitz function ϕ on ∂Ω. We formulate some conditions under which a given function in ϕ + $\begin{array}{} \displaystyle W^{1,p}_0 \end{array}$(Ω) with I(u) < +∞ can be approximated in the W1,p norm and in energy by a sequence of smooth functions that coincide with ϕ on ∂Ω. As a particular case we obtain that the Lavrentiev phenomenon does not occur when F(x, u, ξ) = f(x, u) + h(x, ξ) is convex and x ↦ F(x, 0, 0) is sufficiently smooth.